Material-Political Engagements With Carnal and Ecological Hermeneutics in Environmental Education

• In Event: 32.083 - Roundtable Session 12
  In Roundtable Session: 32.083-20 - Emerging Approaches in Environmental Education Research

Abstract

This paper addresses how recent ecological and embodied reflections on hermeneutics as “the art and science of interpretation” (Utsler et al, 2014, p. 1) can provide new insights and guidance in environmental education praxis. While hermeneutics and its frequent counterpart phenomenology are often positioned as at odds with or distinct from historical and material analyses of human experience or challenges (Treanor, 2015), I aim to demonstrate how hermeneutic enquiry connects embodied experience not only with discourses, facts, or intellectual traditions, but also vitally engages subjects with material relations and sociopolitical structures.

Since the groundbreaking work of Heidegger in hermeneutic phenomenology, many scholars have subsequently taken up hermeneutics to address material conditions of inequity, injustice, and environmental catastrophe (Zizek, 2000; Kearney, 2003; Toadvine, 2015). Among the most recent trends in hermeneutics, there is an increased emphasis on ecological or environmental concerns, as well as a turn toward corporeality that is potentially fruitful for the task of ecopedagogy (Kahn, 2010). Interest in hermeneutics in environmental education is not new (see Seidel & Jardine, 2014; Derby, 2015; Iared, de Oliveira, & Payne, 2016), and this paper builds upon that tradition by attending to new directions in hermeneutics.

I am particularly influenced by Richard Kearney’s method of “diacritical hermeneutics,” originally defined as an approach that endeavours “to explore possibilities of intercommunion between distinct but not incomparable selves… by welcoming difference… without succumbing to mystique or madness” (2003, p. 18). Diacritical hermeneutics recognizes that meaning is always partial and incomplete, while also suggesting that differences between selves and others are not the deep, uncrossable chiasms that are proposed in a radical hermeneutics or politics of alterity. Kearney has also recently drawn upon Merleau-Ponty’s “diacritical perception” in order to articulate the carnality of intersubjective experience and knowing, which includes not only humans, but non-human animals, nature, and the Divine (Kearney, 2011; Kearney, 2015). Kearney’s analysis concludes that through our bodies or “flesh,” we “engage upon an intersubjective world with others and empathize with them” (2015, p. 53) and so seeks to encourage ongoing carnal explorations of meaning.

This paper conveys how these hermeneutic directions toward carnal encounters in varied environments are generative in orientating EE toward not only a more rigorous concern with embodied interpretation, but also, crucially, a continued emphasis on material and political engagements necessary for our ecologically troubled times. My initial explorations suggest that there is overlap between the projects of Kearney’s carnal hermeneutics, which I argue is both pragmatic and cautiously political and the multivariant concept of ecopedagogy (Payne & Wattchow, 2009; Kahn, 2010; Russell, 2013; Iared, de Oliveira, & Payne, 2016). In particular, I draw out ecopedagogy’s underlying commitments to embodied and material struggle, attentiveness to alterity, and sociopolitical engagements that seek out utopian visions of multispecies communities. I conclude by arguing that a broader commitment to ecohermeneutic and carnal principles in textual analyses (understood broadly) will strengthen not only ideological discourses within environmental education, but also assist us in understanding material and political sites of struggle and action.

Author

• Joshua James Russell, Canisius College